I have a faint idea that this is either related to the initramfs or the BIOS setup of the sata controller.
I have never been able to boot from grub on this motherboard (Asus P5Q, ICH10R).
The menu.lst symbolic link exists...

I created a grub boot floppy according to the instructions I've found here. Understand that the setup (fd0) command invokes the grub-install command to look for menu.1st as the config file instead of grub.conf, and done practically everything else I can think of to solve this problem, and I'm stumped. When setup (fd0) completes, it tells me that stage 1 and stage 2 were written properly and the config file is expected to be found in /boot/grub/menu.1st, and that's exactly where it is.

When I boot from the floppy, instead of seeing the grub splash and the boot option, I get dumped back to the grub prompt after stage 2 has loaded. Somehow, the menu.1st file is not being found by grub.

At the grub prompt, if I enter "configfile /boot/grub/menu.1st", everything boots up perfectly.

I have the same problem as these guys, but I have not been able to solve it. I've searched high and low without satisfaction. So I must be missing something along the way.
I was previously triple booting Win 7, Crunchbang, and Gentoo. All was working well using Grub2 from Crunchbang to boot Gentoo. I finally have Gentoo working well enough to drop Crunchbang, so I have deleted it from my system. I am using Windows bootloader, then chainloading into Grub. I used EasyBCD in Windows for the boot menu.

At present, I can boot into Windows fine (using Windows bootloader). When I choose linux from my Windows boot menu, I get the prompt

Code:

grub>

I can then type

Code:

configfile (hd0,2)/grub/menu.lst

and it boots perfectly. What am I doing, or have I done, to keep this from being automatic?

I worked for 2 days trying to figure that out before I posted.
I finally realized that the grub prompt I was seeing was on a screen with

Quote:

GRUB4DOS

at the top of the screen. I went into Windows and removed the entry for Linux from EasyBCD (the same I was using with Crunchbang) and made a new entry for Gentoo. Now everything works as intended.
How dumb can I feel?
Problem solved.

So I seem to have a similar problem as reported repeatedly on this thread but none of the solutions have worked. I recently installed gentoo and it was working just fine. Somehow, during the install, I did not make /dev/sda7 as large as I wanted. So, using fdisk, I changed the size of /dev/sda7. The file system is installed on /dev/sda3, /dev/sda5 & /dev/sda6 but I didn't touch those partitions. As I read that rewriting the partition table wipes out the grub command in the MBR, I re-issued grub-install --no-floppy /dev/sda (/dev/sda1/ was probably not mounted). I did not change /etc/mtab as the file was already there. On reboot, all I get now is the grub prompt. My grub.conf is still in /dev/sda1/boot/grub/grub.conf and hasn't changed. I tried making a symbolic link of menu.lst to grub.conf but that didn't make a difference. If I issue configfile /boot/grub.conf, the grub screen with my available kernels comes up. What did I mess up in updating the partition table?